Schroeter’s most visionary movies—the willfully crude, aggressively campy low-budget opera-travesties he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s—were a significant influence on both Fassbinder and Syberberg.

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) romanced Lucrezia Borgia, climbed Mount Etna and invented the semicolon. Titian painted his portrait. An exhibition in Padua focuses on the man and his collection, both extraordinary.

In the May 9 issue, Sanford Schwartz writes, “This exhibition of the mid-nineteenth-century portraitist William Matthew Prior refutes the idea that antebellum American artists usually showed African-Americans in a trivializing manner.”